via Atlas Film
By Daniel Greenwood
This review eventually gets monetary.
The Coen brothers’ now infamous No Country for Old Men has perhaps the greatest opening forty-minutes in modern American cinema. It’s not unlike that of No Country’s Oscar competitor There Will be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007). Both movies begin out there on the carn-darn American frontier, the wilderness that Christopher Columbus parked his gosh-darn boat on back in the day. Each opening is slow and seductive, with Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview in There Will be Blood digging for oil, and No Country for Old Men’s Josh Brolin as Llewelyn Moss, passing across the land to discover a scene of post-drugs-gang-carnage-warfare. [P.S. notice how only recently does the Western world care about Mexicans dying if it's in the form of a virus that might bother us over here, rather than the hundreds of grizzly, drugs-related killings that make up a far more serious epidemic]. The cinematography that constructs this sequence early in No Country is the spellbinding element. Instead of a constant shot-reverse-shot between Brolin’s stunned-expression!!!1! and the mutilated face of a corpse (Goonies-esque), the Coens allow their camera to linger, and the microphones pick up the buzzin’ flies milling around the feast of rotting flesh both human and canine.
The starkest of images here is Brolin’s Llewelyn happening upon a theoretical Garden of Eden away from the scene of the shoot-out. A solitary tree sits atop a barren knoll, a figure slumped against its stump. Upon closer inspection – and these opening scenes really are a case of closer inspection for both protagonist and spectator – the figure has bled to death, and at his feet is Llewelyn’s very own barrel of oil. Inside the briefcase is a stash of cash which he makes off with, but hidden amidst these dollars is a tracking device. This device directs none other than Satan himself, Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh, on Llewelyn’s trail. Bardem’s performance is a debut for many of us, an introduction to this quite brilliant actor. Here he’s a resigned but quietly deranged George Clooney, kind of handsome in that death is sexy style. But death ain’t sexy. It’s explicitly violent in this country minus old men and the killings are numerous.
Tommy Lee Jones is the sheriff of the frontier (Ed Tom Bell) having to clean up after these pests, and he’s altogether more resigned than Bardem the executioner. Indeed, Bell’s significance is his retrospective role in the film, not as a storyteller, but as the sigh that comes after the fact. Perhaps the film is titled after him, and in a land where violence reigns, what can an old man do but take off his hat and sit on down. The police here are useless, they’re brutalised by Bardem. The concept of police enforcement is undermined by the idea that the only way they could ever actually enforce law is by matching the brutality of the drugs cartels and rogue killers such as Bardem. But it’s also a matter of money, and in No Country for Old Men, money does more than talk – it gets every crazy mother after you – and in the end it gets you killed.
But what is money, really. For those among us who’ve had problems getting even basic employment in the past twelve-months, it’s something we’re not privy to, but are willed by our peers to discuss at length. In one painstaking and baffling advert for vodka that’s currently doing the rounds, its soundtrack claims that ‘money makes the world go round’, against images of cinema-goers kissing the cheeks of ticket sellers. Money, like the internet, is 24-hours. You can get it out at a cash point – if you have some – at 3am in the morning, you don’t have to wait for the bank manager to open his doors the next day. In fact, with a certain credit card conglomerate’s campaign to convince the public (with tongue-mildly-in-cheek) to forget about physical money altogether, finance has become a figment of my imagination. The job you work is worked only on the grounds that you have faith in your employer’s promise to buffer your invisible account with invisible monies witnessed, nowadays, as pithy digits through a smudged and smashed cash machine screen (thanks, Hard-Fi). But, if Joel and Ethan Coen teach us anything, it’s that the banker ain’t the wanker, I am. All the problems encountered with money are there because I choose to participate in an advanced-Capitalist society. Idiot. Though of course No Country for Old Men is far more entertaining and Oscar-worthy than the rant above.
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